In partnership with the Curtis Institute of Music, WHYY presents the following program.

♪♪ I'm Isaiah Serrano.

I play the violin.

But I study composition at Curtis.

It was sort of a long road from a young child's dreams of becoming a virtuoso violinist and then sort of the disillusionment of that.

I started playing violin pretty young.

I was six, which I guess is sort of in the middle these days, but I was playing.

My teacher was like a 13-year-old kid at my school.

So my lessons were very sort of, very loose and fun.

But I wasn't a good student at all.

I was pretty terrible and I would, you know, improvise, which is what I call it retrospectively, but I was really a screw around in lessons and I was sort of hellish to teach.

So I was playing for a while.

I lived in Tampa, Florida, which is not a very fun place to grow up.

It was a nice childhood, but it was very boring.

It was slow.

I lived in Old Seminole Heights, which is a county within a county that is known for having old buildings, old restaurants, old people.

I grew up in a very old neighborhood.

So moving to Miami at age 10, I was sort of thrust into this like fast-paced world.

The music scene was different.

So yeah, it was an interesting experience.

[MUSIC] And my parents, although they are both music lovers, my dad's like an amateur guitarist, they weren't musicians in the same way, classical, traditional context.

So I kind of came to it through that lens.

I grew up on the Beatles, my dad played Led Zeppelin and System of a Down, my mom was into shoegaze and all that stuff, so classical music was sort of the natural extension of that for me.

I guess some memorable performances, I remember many performances that were disastrous, and I had many of those.

I remember one, I had just moved to Miami, I think I was about 12, 11 or 12, and I made this sort of, this very presumptuous and zealous video for this youth music festival in Miami that was happening near my house.

So I recorded this video, it was like a medley of all these pieces that were way harder than I could actually execute.

And then I ended up on a whim, I got this thing, I got to be on stage and I was like with a bunch of other musicians, we were playing and I had this like solo thing.

So I like wrote a piece.

It was like one of the first times I ever got to play something that I had written on violin.

And I got on stage and like I don't know if you are familiar but like you put this thing called rosin on the bow and for some reason in the Florida humidity it just like doesn't work.

So I was playing and my bow like was slipping off and like my papers flew because it's like Florida like wind and I remember like sort of staring into the distance like my papers had like sort of created this like collage in my line of sight and just thinking like maybe this isn't for me but after I think after a few of those like disasters and in violin performance I just realized like you know I'm not a born performer as much as I love like playing chamber music with my friends and like doing concerts it's not like my strong suit but I love working with musicians that are like just incredible performers.

So about performing and I guess as a composer like performing kind of has to do with sitting in the audience witnessing the synthesis of your intellect like just being presented.

[Music] Just the fact that there's, you know, sometimes hundreds of people there to see what I created.

[Music] And that's really, really cool.

And it's sort of, in many ways, like, is sort of the goal.

You want people to listen to your music.

But I think all composers have to grapple with the fact that you're putting your thoughts, your memories, your ideas, your musical technique, all of these things, you're putting them in the hands of other people.

And I think, you know, as long as those are people you trust, it can be really gratifying.

But I've had experiences where, you know, I'm really nervous.

And when you bomb on stage as a performer, you walk off and kind of dust your shirt off and you take a beat.

But I think as a composer, like, bad performances are like really crushing.

So I think that that's like, you know, and at Curtis, the musicians are so incredible that it's sort of like your fault, like, in a way, if it doesn't go well.

So I guess that's like the balance you have to strike, and that's where the pros and cons come in.

[Music] Well I was about as equally good at practicing as I was at sort of being taught.

I did not practice very much, but when I did, I would try to practice every day, I would get kind of lost in thought, and I was sort of just always wandering on the instrument, and like the score for me since I was a kid was more of just like a guideline.

And since then, my reverence for the canon has sort of grown, and I've grown to appreciate sort of the treasures of the score more, but certainly when I was young, it was very, I mean I couldn't read music for the first two years I played.

My teacher would color code my pieces, so I learned like red meant A string, red three meant third finger.

And I didn't develop any like genius synesthesia from that, which is kind of a shame, because that would be cool, but it did sort of help me gain this internal relationship between like the physicality of playing and like notation.

I feel like that kind of stuck with me into composition.

Over time I sort of discovered, I was like, wait, what is this?

And I realized that, oh, I played this piece.

I remember this melody from childhood.

And eventually I just realized like, you know, I had been taught by my parents about like this amazing music history after like 1930.

But like there's like thousands of years of it before.

So I think going into high school, I, you know, was wanting to be a violinist, but I didn't really understand just like how amazing, expansive and how like dense and sort of illuminating the canon can be.

So that was sort of my process in terms of discovering classical music.

Really slow, super emotional music and again we're writing love songs.

Once again, we were doing that a thousand years ago and now we're doing it again.

So that's really interesting to me, that history tends to repeat itself.

It goes in these cycles and if we think about what period of history we are in now.

We're in the past.

Right.

Right.

Right.

So in a way, we can always look back to the past and consider how history relates to the music we have now, or the art, or the, you know, any other historical, cultural idea.

So we're going to play this piece, which is called "Versus" by a guy named Reinpold Brier, who was born in 1875.

Did anyone know how long ago that was?

Last week?

Oh, okay.

Can I get that in the... I wrote a piece for last year's Cameron Music Concert, where all the composers write one piece, and it was for piano quartet, so I wrote it for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano.

And it was called Three Bagatelles.

And I was sort of thinking about in the vein of like this like this simple music that is unassuming from the 19th century.

(music) And just like the way the baguette as a musical form sort of like grew and blossomed into like this genre kind of affiliated with experimental music, I was thinking about that.

[Music] And I kind of wrote three movements based off melodic motives that is used a lot by Schubert who is one of my favorite composers.

And it was a really fun experience and I had such a great time working with the performers.

They're fantastic and some of my good friends.

It was really cool.

[ Pause ] [ Music ] [ Pause ] [ Music ] [ Pause ] [ Music ] [ Sound Effects ] [ Music ] >> Just the people I've met here, the people I get to call my friends and colleagues and also the people that have become friends and mentors, that has been so invaluable for my musical progression.

In terms of like learning, but also getting opportunities, I don't think there's a place like Curtis that will be, that will like always be your foundation in terms of getting yourself out there and finding things to do.

And just friends of mine and teachers that have been willing to sort of extend their hand and bring me in on a project or give me a certain goal to work towards or a commission.

Those things have been super, super cool.

Yeah, Curtis is the place for that.

Three years, I would say write a really good piece.

I've liked a few measures of pieces I've written in the past and some ideas, but I really want to write a piece that I just can put my name behind like front to back.

So hopefully in three years I'll have done that or we'll be getting somewhere with that goal.

Five years I would love to start teaching somehow.

I probably won't have my own studio or be you know any kind of a you know dean of a school, but I would love to like have just a class or something that I could teach.

I love teaching and both my parents were in the past teachers so and I've like tutored stuff before so like teaching for me that's like the real joy of this process.

Teaching in terms of like the music I write being able to communicate but also like just myself I love teaching and then ten years down the line I guess like more of the same I'd love to have a studio have enough money for a house or like an apartment and yeah just like live a live a life that's sort of imbibed in music that'll be super cool.

So I plan to hopefully do a master's and I would love to be back at Curtis, but I also, you know, the world is big and I would love to explore and go to different state, different country, Germany, that has been calling my name recently so I would love to sort of explore in that way.

I think in composition, getting your name out there in terms of musicians knowing you and being able to commission you, people that direct orchestras and all that stuff, I think that's a good jumping off point.

I don't know if like in the same way as maybe a competition could kickstart a career in violin.

I don't know if it's really necessarily the same in music but I think making friends is a big part of it and I'm lucky because I love doing that so it doesn't feel like a chore to me.

Just being in Philly, Marian Anderson Hall is like so cool and it's just like really is like a dream venue just like the seating, the acoustics, everything about it is like really amazing.

Just being from Miami, the New World Symphony was such a core aspect of my musical upbringing.

My first like my first real serious like teachers came from that facility.

[music] Well, I'd probably tell my younger self, "Don't worry so much."

I'm sure you hear that a lot.

I was a nervous kid.

I had a stutter.

It was hard for me to communicate and express myself in a way that felt meaningful.

So I'd probably say, "Just chill and it'll happen and you'll find your outlet and you will grow."

And also just listen to the people around you and don't get trapped in a tunnel vision spiral.

I think that kind of thing is, those were lessons I needed to learn back then that took me a while.

And then for my older self, I would say, I think I would be curious and I would ask a lot of questions.

I think it's been so hard for me to predict my career, I think it's sort of impossible to say with confidence where you're going to end up.

So I would probably ask, where did you end up?

And I'd say, maybe touch the violin here and there so you don't lose that completely.

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